A lot of times as I'm reading throught forums I've noticed that people will use social abilities as a way to judge a class either it be there base charisma or how many abilities they possess that give them bonuses in social situations or just having access to spells that straight up charm and control people. Now this is all well and good for looking at a class but it made me think about the Y factor of social encounters which is the actual characters. When I say this I mean that your devout cleric of torm is a lot more likely to get a church of torm to help and support them then your wild magic sorcerer is despite them having a higher charisma score... and at the same time the people might be more likely to listen to a folk hero fighter from there region of life then the far away noble.

the best actual example I have of this is in one of my games we had to convince a group of orcs to join our side in a conflict involving the fate of the world hanging in the balance. We had barely managed to convince the other side (including elfs they previously fought a war against) but we had a good feeling about it... and then we spent quite a while actually trying and failing to convince them... three of our party members had a +5 charisma and things that could help them in social encounters yet non it really mattered as we couldn't convince them to join our side... to them either side was likely to actually betray them there own benefit and it just happened that it seemed like the bad guys had a better chance of actually winning. We where about done trying when our -1 charisma halfing barbarian stepped forward. Our barbarian knew what being treated differently was like... and he had even watched as a tribe of half orcs who had accepted him and helped him control his anger turn to evil because of mistrust and he knew what these orcs really wanted. So he offered them his own trust that no matter what happened he would help them. And that was that.. they showed up in the conflict and helped us at conflict helping to actually tip the scales and also making it one of my favorite dnd moments.

I guess the point of all this is to remember the Y factor and how it actually effects social situations... because maybe your character can do more then you think they can when talking
also what are some Y factor social moments you remember really well 

Charisma is a projection of your personality and soul. At least I know for sure about the soul part, think personality was one. This means that if you want to make someone afraid of you, you have to be threatening. If you want someone to be trusting in your side, you have to truly give them an insight into your beliefs and intentions. And power isn't just effectiveness, but the ability to limit your output, such a deceit. If you want someone to believe your lies, you must not show what you really want, and even change people's views of what you want.

Then in the example of the cleric and a church, grant advantage. Then go for disadvantage for vice versa.

Then as the game says, you can only use things like persuasion on someone who is willing to believe you. If they will never hear you out, they don't care. If it's something they wouldn't do normally, why should you be able to peer pressure them yourself. People still have standards, and the folks at Wizards of the Coast planned that part out.

well the point is that they didn't want to listen until we offered them the one thing that they truly wanted

which was someone they could truly trust and our barbarian managed to be that

I do agree often charisma is the main factor but I also believe there are sort of alternate factors that come into play beyond just the simple number of your charisma score which is why I brought this up 

The part about the barbarian didn't require any checks, so it didn't really matter anyways if charisma was involved or not. It isn't something with rules written, since he just used a fact that they knew instead of persuading. If it were made with checks, it could have been granted advantage for being reasonable. Although orcs don't tend to be reasonable.

Not giving any kind of negative tone, just talking about what the rules are and why.

I get there are these sort of rules in place and I'm sort of mentioning how rules aren't the only sort of way to run social situations.. because a nat 20 won't let you just become a king or convince someone who just saw you kill someone that you didn't unless you make a dang goof reason

and for the it didn't matter if charisma was involved with the barbarian is the point... he didn't need charisma to get them because he had a good reason for them to join (also it was a homebrew setting so orcs where more of semi violent tribes rather then just gruumish said murder)

I was just saying that him not using charisma was technically using the basic rules since he didn't use a check. And the rules make it so natural 20's don't do such large scale things, because criticals don't apply to checks in the rules, and people wouldn't believe it so a persuasion check wouldn't work.